Leena and Red and Those Who Never Were
by BoloBouncer
Summary: A later Doctor travels with Leena, a Gorl that can see all possibility in a single person. Together, they travel to save Leena's mother from an immortal, time-travelling human with the ability to erase anything from existence.
1. Leena, Zsu, and Red

The Doctor was running out of breath as the Hammerbeast gained on him. It had shaved the nape of his neck a few times, sending a flurry of purple sparks through his vision and scattering his emotions. The Hammerbeast was best known for its hammer-shaped head, but also for its ability to completely turn people inside-out emotionally. They turned love to hate, fear to elation, and mania to unfathomable depression.

But first it had to get to you.

The Doctor was jumping rocks on a dark, empty planet. Well, empty save the Hammerbeast. It had landed on the barren planet in a futile search for its family. Having lost them sometime around the Time War, it traveled the galaxy looking for its three mothers and sister. Its search was constant and unending.

The Doctor's red hair flickered in the multicolored moonlight. "I can help you find your family!" he said, jumping boulders. The Hammerbeast just kept trucking forward. "I have a time machine! We can go back and find them!" The beast swung its head violently at the Doctor, missing this time by an inch.

The Doctor suddenly felt love for the rocks in his way. He wanted to lean down and hug them. It was a mild sensation. The Hammerbeast had gotten close but had not yet landed an emotionally scattering blow.

"I don't think you understand who you're dealing with," the Doctor said as they bounded down an incline.

The Hammerbeast didn't talk but it grunted and huffed. It could see the tiny, blue TARDIS off in the distance. The Doctor's time machine couldn't save him. He would run out of breath and collapse long before getting to the safety of the call box. The Hammerbeast swung again and grazed his shoulder, turning the Doctor's desperation into assurance. He slowed down, and the Hammerbeast stopped fast, standing directly behind the Time Lord.

"Oh dear," the Doctor said as the hammer fell.

I I I

"Temporal mechanics," said Dr. Stately to his classroom of seven thousand, tell us that in addition to infinite time and infinite dimensions, there are also infinite places that do not exist, that will never occur and never happen.

The green Gorl in the front row raised its hand. "But didn't the Zsu test in the Hyperion cluster disprove that?"

Dr. Stately smiled and looked intrigued. "Zsu's journey to the World That Never Was has not yet been verified as he has yet to return."

Just as Dr. Stately finished his sentence, a glint began its descent from the top of the classroom arcology. It was a lecture pod, used to ferry the professors back-and-forth to the podium. A voice spoke through the speakers under the students' seats.

"But I have returned." It was the snakelike voice of Zsu, the foremost temporal researcher on Earth, a man born in 2150 but somehow still alive now in 5280, an expert in time because he had lived more of it than most other humanoids. And now here he was, returning triumphant from a place that did not exist.

"I have returned, and I have evidence," he said stepping out of the pod next to the smallish Dr. Stately. Both humans, Stately stood an even five feet tall, compared to the towering Zsu, a smooth-skinned multi-millenarian that had to look down at most people to address them.

He pulled a small, black item from his jacket. It looked like a pair of scissors, but only a silhouette of scissors. There was no texture or depth to them. It was as if they weren't there.

Zsu pointed to the green Gorl in the front row. "You. You know that I went to a place that does not exist. But if it does not exist, how did I get there?"

The Gorl flipped through some scattered notes, put on its tri-specs and read aloud. "Temporal diversification means odd interval temporal annihilation. But annihilation happens relative to other timelines-"

Zsu stepped down from the proscenium and snatched the papers from the Gorl. "What is your name?" 

"Leena. Sir."

"You're reading my notes, Leena." He made a show of looking at the paper and then at Leena and then back to the paper. "How would you have gotten these?" He was challenging the young creature, young relative to him, anyway.

Leena was uneasy and looked it. The green spines running down the Gorl's back furled. "Because I've traveled with someone that doesn't exist."

Zsu reached under Leena's desk and audio-ed her workstation into the classroom's speakers. Then he leaped back onto the lecture stage and walked in a circle with his arms raised. Zsu looked like a man that had just conquered the universe, but he didn't say anything. He looked at Leena, his arms still raised. He was still challenging her, drawing the next sentence out of her, not through science or magic, but through the ages old intuition of someone that knows when someone has something important to say.

"What is going on?" Dr. Stately finally chimed in. He couldn't bear to look directly at Zsu. So, he shuffled awkwardly to the podium and spoke into the mic. "What is going on, Leena?"

The Gorl looked at Zsu and saw nothingness in his eyes, saw the end of the universe and the beginning of another. The Gorl had the ability to see the Other, the Person in the Mirror, the Person That Could Have Been when looking at a creature. The Gorl saw a person not as a static thing but as a fluid fluctuation of a lifetime's worth of choices. Zsu had lived a long life.

There were more than a few of her race present in the classroom, their innate racial abilities bound up in the research of temporal mechanics. Many served as valued researchers abroad, but under Zsu's watch, several had been true-to-life guinea pigs, strapped in and suited up for painful, dangerous tests. They all claimed to have done so willingly, to have wanted to see what lied beyond, but it was awkward and grandiose presentations like those today that made most creatures not trust the snaked-voiced Zsu. Though, most claimed to respect him.

"Who does not exist?" Dr. Stately's faced twitched with discomposure.

The entire classroom stood, all seven thousand, as they watched what was happening on the monitors in front of their seats. Zsu had reached up behind Dr. Stately with the silhouette scissors. The smallish man hadn't even noticed, his own nerves clouding out his periphery.

The hall was silent. A human girl next to Leena gasped. This caused Dr. Stately to turn around. He looked up and, in the panic of the moment, no longer saw Zsu, but rather a giant of the Earth, a being that had seemed to live forever, looking down at him like he wasn't even there.

I I I

In all the years he had lived, the Doctor had never been so sad. The Hammerbeast had been reunited with its family in the most heartwarming scene ever played out under a multicolored moon. He had sung and laughed and danced with them, almost like a Hammerbeast himself, but such close contact with the happy clan had rewired the Doctor's emotional circuitry, at least for the moment. He deliberately stubbed his toe against the TARDIS control panel to feel better.

"Remind me never to misinterpret the emotional state of a creature whose happiness can make you want to explode yourself," the ginger Doctor said, circling the panel, flipping switches. "Maybe when they hit you on the head, it means, 'Thank you.' Or, 'Sure. Thank you.' Or, 'Look, there's my family.' Probably the last one, but maybe the first one." He scratched his head and walked out the doors onto the rocky planet.

The Doctor looked up.

"The stars are in the wrong place."

He walked back in and tapped some buttons, pulling out a small screen. He walked outside again.

The Doctor pointed his finger at the stars, mentally rearranging them. He looked confused. The Hammerbeast clan was still celebrating a short ways off.

"Excuse me," the Doctor said, walking into their midst. They were drunk on upside-down happiness.

"S(HF98hf," the Hammerbeasts said in unison. It translated as, "Hello, red-vested one." The Doctor wore what appeared to be a large life-preserver. He felt safer in the TARDIS that way, in case of floods.

"What planet is this? I mean, I thought it was Titnel VII. I mean, it seems like Titnel VII."

"sjp0938eh5p9e8ht?" they replied. "What is Titnel VII?" 

The Doctor nodded. "Right, right. What is Titnel VII," he trailed off. The he walked back to the TARDIS. He popped the small screen out again and tapped it. "Wrong universe?"

He walked outside and looked up again.

"Wrong universe."

I I I

Leena spoke quickly. "It was the Doctor."

Zsu held fast. Dr. Stately took the opportunity to run off the stage. "You know him," the tall, ancient said, pointing the nothingness shears at the Gorl.

"I knew him," Leena said with more than a little regret. "Like I said," she choked. "He doesn't exist."

Zsu lowered his arm but still managed to point the scissors toward her. "Paradox."

The Gorl's three eyes blinked left-to-right and a tear fell from each one. "Pointlessness," she whispered. Because Zsu had linked her workstation into the classroom's speaker system, everyone heard what Leena said. She pushed her Retraction button causing her station to move itself to the aisle, taking her back and out of the classroom while everyone stood silent and watched, even Zsu. He had seemed to understand her pain for just a moment before regaining his composure.

He hopped in the lecture pod and flew up and out in pursuit. A general murmur rose from the students. With Stately cowering and Zsu gone, class had been summarily dismissed.

Leena ran through Corridor 7 past the Temporal Mechanics labs and Shurn Terrarium. Zsu's notes crinkled in her hand as well as a single slip of paper written by the Doctor.

"How did you know him," Zsu stepped out in front of her as she turned a corner. The Gorl almost fell on him, and would have, except for her ability to stick instantly to any surface. She stopped flat.

"You were going to kill him," she said. "Dr. Stately."

The old man pulled out the shears. "There's a difference between dying and not existing," he said. Several students threw sideways glances as they walked past. Indifferent to his audience, Zsu spoke with impunity. He poked at the papers in Leena's hand. "How did you get my notes?"

"I've met you before."

"How did you meet me before?"

She squeezed the papers. "I took a time machine to the future, met you, listened to every regret you had about everything you had ever done, and you gave me your notes." She paused. Leena looked up at him for a moment. His face was young, definitely not the one she remembered seeing locked up in the Time Prison: the galaxy's famous incarceration facility for wayward temporal tinkerers that just didn't know when to quit.

"Were you his pet?" Zsu asked.

Leena grabbed at the shears, and the man snapped backward a step.

"Did he treat you like he treats everyone else?"

The Gorl was tough, but hurt shown in her face. Her spines twitched.

"Did the Doctor show you the best parts of the universe and then drop you off to live the mundane life of someone that can never again have space-time as their own personal playground? Tell me how it feels."

She reached again, and Zsu grabbed her shoulder. The Gorl spun around the man's flank and twisted his arm. Leena whispered into his back. "You will hate yourself for everything that you do." She pushed him forward. Zsu stuck the shears back into his pocket.

Leena walked away, his notes still in her hand.

I I I

The Traxian clung to the wall, its amorphous jelly quivering against approaching thunderclaps.

"Hello there," it said as Leena walked in the door. "Assaulting a man that can erase your existence with a twitch of his fingers. Not smart."

Leena set the notes down and didn't look at her roommate. Her leftmost eye scanned the room. She calmed and bit her lip. "I can do far worse to him."

"You can't," the Traxian said and sloughed to the floor. It formed upward into the shape of a nondescript humanoid. "You won't."

"I won't," Leena said with sass and dropped down into her chair. An auto-masseuse arm activated and went to work on her tense spines. She examined her hands and the desk in front of her. Though, she didn't see a desk and she didn't see her hands. She saw the TARDIS control panel, the Time Lord with shock red hair and the taut centrifugal rings of the Daelus Cluster, the first place they had ever journeyed together.

Leena spun in the chair and faced the Traxian. "You saw everything, huh? Did you use the link?"

Traxians could make substantial empathic and telepathic links with those that shared close quarters with them. They could also slip around as a mostly invisible sheen because their bodies had no mass. Leena had seen her Traxian turn into everything from a shower curtain to a food wrapper, and while she sensed no mischief or ill will from her nameless roommate, the Gorl always suspected there was much more to him than anyone would guess. After having first encountered the Traxian people in the Daelus Cluster with the Doctor, she had been presented with a race that was so calm and collected that one could swear they were always hiding something.

I I I

"They're so calm and collected. I swear, they are hiding something," the Doctor said, leading Leena through the Gshtarl Unet, or, 'The Hall of Traxus.' It was a large, rotating sphere lined with twitching statues.

"Doesn't seem like they would have a lot to hide. They have no mass," Leena said. She pulled a recording device from her oversized lab coat.

"The statues," the Doctor said, pointing, "Are made of Traxians. They just hang there."

"What are they doing?" Leena pointed the device around the room.

"Trying," he said, frankly. The Doctor reached for her recorder. Leena snatched it away. "I'm just curious," he said.

"So am I," Leena replied and went back to scanning. She tapped a few buttons.

"Maybe," he said, "They have so little mass that you can't read it, or they have so much that you can't read it."

Leena walked deeper into the hall, "It's a wonder that you get anywhere in the universe with second guessing like that."

"Not second guesses. Observations. Questions. Queries. Possibilities."

"Too many," she said, looking him up-and-down, "Red."

The Doctor was tall and skinny. He wore tan corduroy leggings and a bright orange vest. His hair was so bright that it almost glowed, like he never quite finished regenerating, and the power had all accumulated over his head.

"Trying what? Trying to make a statue?"

"Trying everything, anything, nothing. Try to be nothing. Trying to be your best friend, your enemy, your coat. They are natural experimenters." The Doctor ascended to a small dais. It sunk and pooled in front of his feet before reforming as a bear with a helmet on.

Leena picked up a bag of marbles and rolled it in her hand. "No wonder you don't trust them. They'll do anything."

The Doctor shook his head. "No, no. You're safe here. Traxians are safe. They have a very strict moral code."

The Gorl pulled out a marble and tossed it in the air. "I sure hope you read that code thoroughly." She caught the marble. "And why aren't they trying to communicate?"

A blob slithered over next to Leena and formed up into the shape of an older-looking Gorl. Its face mushed and skewed, twitching and morphing until it settled on a figure that looked something like Leena's.

"Looks like they're trying for you," the Doctor said, pointing. He sauntered over.

Leena gazed, slack-jawed. "No," she said and shook her head. "They're trying for my mother."

The Doctor ran his finger along the Traxian copycat. "That's because they're in your head. They're in mine, too. That's how they communicate. They feel what you feel, remember what you remember. They'll talk to us, in their own time, if they feel like it. But for now, it looks like they're interested in you."

Leena put her hands in her coat and peeked around the copycat. "Why me? You're much more interesting than me."

"I'm not a Traxian," he said. "You're a Gorl. Your race doesn't even exist to them yet. Thousands of light years and millions of years distance. Wouldn't you be interested?"

Leena lightly grasped at the copycat's fingers. "But you have the time machine. You fought in a time war."

The Doctor sobered a bit. "War's interesting," he said, also putting his hands in his pockets. "But at best, it's just a really bad game. Time travel's just a different kind of mobility. Doesn't matter if you're a Traxian, human, Gorl, or Time Lord. There's magic and beauty in the universe that far transcends our running and our fears."

The copycat Gorl blinked its three eyes. "Hello," it said and gripped Leena's fingers. She quickly pulled away.

"Hallo!" the Doctor said and stepped up. He took the copycat's hand. "I'm the Doctor, and this is- well, you know who this is. You're in her head."

"What can they see? What can you see?" Leena asked.

"Nothing that you would not readily show us," the Traxian said. "We have learned that such limits must exist, but some connection is necessary to facilitate communication."

The Doctor looked the hall up-and-down. "The bear with the helmet. What was that all about?"

The Traxian turned to him. "You were thinking about a bear with a helmet."

He nodded. "Quite right."

"But I wasn't thinking about my mother," Leena said, furling her spines. "I really wasn't thinking about her."

"We did not glean her from your mind. You simply look like her."

"You've met my mother," the Gorl said, flexing her hands in her pockets.

The Traxian transformed into a tall humanoid with a long, brown duster and a blue suit and pointed at the Doctor. "He brought her here."

"You what?" Leena said, stepping backward. She tottered and almost tripped. The Doctor's head glowed under the swirling lights of a descending Traxian procession. He took several deep breaths before speaking.

"I stood in this hall, with your mother. A long time ago. Longer for me. Not so long for you." The Doctor reached out his hand to help Leena up and she sunk down onto her haunches. "That's why I brought you here. So you could know."

"I know something happened to her. I lost her," Leena said, her spines standing on end. "What did you do to her?"

"I didn't do anything to her. I couldn't help her." He was angry.

"And who is this?" Leena pointed up at the copy in the duster.

"That's me. When I was here last. It was a different life for me, different generation."

She sat back and scanned the ground, confused. "Why would you do this to me?"

"So you could know the truth."

"I don't want to know the truth," she said. "I don't want to be here."

The procession landed just behind the Doctor. Eight pools formed into nondescript humanoids. They started to speak but he stopped them. "I'll tell her."

Leena was backing toward the TARDIS. The Doctor leaned down and took her hand. "I know the Gorl can see all possibility in one person, but you can't see it in me." She was crying. Leena shook her head.

He squeezed her hand. "Your mother could see it, too, just like any other Gorl. She couldn't see it in me, either. Just like you, she couldn't. And then she met a man whose possibilities were almost universally bad. It wasn't me. It wasn't, I promise."

She sniffed. "What happened to her? What did he do?"

"She trapped him. Shadow Proclamation came, put him in a time prison. He'll never hurt anyone again."

"Then why isn't she here!"

"Because she can't be. Because he took her before she could stop him." The Doctor snapped his fingers. "Just like that. That's the power he had. The Traxians," he said as Leena tried to pull away. The Doctor let her go. "The Traxians have been trying for a millenium, in this hall, to find a way to bring your mother back."

"Why," Leena said. "Why would they do that?"

The procession stepped forward. "Because she saved us."

The Doctor leaned down and whispered, "There are whole races that will spend a thousand years trying to bring back one good person. That is the universe you've run out into. And you need to know that first, here, now, because so much seems worse. So much seems terrible. You need to know and hope."

"Hope for what?" she asked, looking into his eyes.

"That this works," the Doctor said and pulled out a small, silver fragment.

"We have found a way to bring your mother back, but we need the Doctor's help." The copy in the duster stepped backward into line with the procession.

"And I need your help," the Doctor said, reaching for Leena again. She wiped her nose and looked around the hall and back at the TARDIS.

"I, um, feel like there should be some sort of epic musical phrase before I say yes," she said.

"It's a big universe," the Doctor said, helping her up. "I'm sure there's music playing somewhere."

"Sure thing, Red," Leena said, still looking faint. She patted the Doctor's back and almost went down on her knees again.

He helped her back up.


	2. All That Lives Is Getting Out

Leena helped the Doctor to his feet.

"Tremors are getting worse," she said as they ambled through the rocky catacombs.

Ahead and behind them lay miles of decades old tunneling made by the Algar, or, as the Traxians called it, 'The Trembling Beast.' Its home was a sun-warm orb that lay in a pit near their planet's crust. Beast it was, it never ate anyone or anything, but by simply passing through in the cramped quarters, its natural body heat could burn someone alive.

"Beast that never existed, living out its days beneath the planet like it's been here all along," the Doctor said, swaggering and stumbling amidst the tremors.

Leena stumbled with him. "But how do you know it never existed? I mean, it is here."

The Doctor stopped and stroked his big vest. "Leena, you see possibility. I see time. Its wisps, creaks, tenors and tears. Plus, you know, I have a time machine. But, without even seeing the future of Traxus, I would already know the Algar never should have been here. Never was."

Large quake.

"Well it is now!" Leena said, grabbing the walls. The corridor behind them began to glow liquid orange.

The sound of a thousand scuttling claws came at the duo from around the corner. An endless fleece of tiny, metallic insects swarmed over the Doctor and Leena, lifting the silver fragment from the Gorl's pocket. The humanoid pair shook and flailed and shuddered as the swarm sank to the floor and formed up into the shape of the former Doctor in the duster.

"You two are so slow," it said and threw the fragment down the corridor toward the oncoming heat. The tremors instantly worsened, bouncing all three of them between the walls, the copycat Doctor melding and meshing to absorb the blows.

A web began to grow around the fragment, crawling up the rocks, forming a faint seal across the passageway. A purple glyph appeared in front of it, an airy hallucination hovering between the oncoming Algar and the Traxian, Gorl, and Time Lord.

"That should do it," the Traxian said, looking pleased with itself.

The beast kept coming.

"That should do it," Leena said, her spines standing on edge. She rolled her three eyes. "You're like him."

"I am him," it said, still pleased.

The ginger doctor picked up a rock and threw it at the web. The rock disappeared. "You are not me."

"What is that thing?" Leena asked, walking between the simulacra. She stuck her finger out.

"Don't touch it," the two others said in unison. Red glared.

His copy went on looking pleased. "I saved you."

"If you're me, that means I saved us," Red said, pulling Leena's hand away.

"I saved both of you," it said, pointing at them.

Red pulled his copy's hand down, too. "You know how it's obvious that you're not me? I've saved lots of people."

Leena said nodded toward her companion. "He gets over it faster." She removed Red's hands from both of theirs.

The beast turned the corner, ran straight at them, hit the glyph, and vanished.

"Same question," she said. "What is this purple thing?"

Red scanned it with his sonic screwdriver (also red). "It's a gateway. A doorway."

The copycat dug in his pockets.

Red smiled at him and waved the screwdriver around. "Can't copy this."

Leena looked the web up-and-down. "I see two doorways here. I mean, this one gate has the potential to be another, a different kind, I assume."

The copy picked up another rock and tossed it through. "Gateway to a world of dreams. World of nothing. Worlds that never were. Everything that isn't, that shouldn't be, that never was, belongs in there."

"And now that beast is in there, too," the Gorl said, rubbing her arm. There was a large welt on it from hitting the wall during the tremor. The Traxian reached out, his hand transforming into a white, viscous substance. It wrapped around the wound then pulled away becoming his arm again. Her injury was gone.

She rubbed the spot. "That's clever."

The Traxian shrugged. "We try."

"And my mother's in there," Leena said, motioning toward the glyph. "Locked away in a world that isn't real."

The copy nodded. "Yes, but-"

Leena stepped into the glyph and vanished. The gateway disappeared behind her.

I I I

The Doctor stood before the Traxian procession in their spherical hall.

They spoke in unison, their featureless faces as calm as the slowly turning walls around them.

"The fragment was a test. To see if we could send something back, to see if we could cross over. It worked."

"Yes, it worked," the Doctor said. "But now I need another one. Leena kind of used that one up."

"It will take us a long time, even relative to a Time Lord's lifespan," they replied.

"That's fine. It's fine. I have the TARDIS. You start now. I'll jump in and come out when...you're..." Red became lost in thought.

"When we're done," spoke the procession.

Red danced his finger thoughtfully. He saw the procession in his mind, saw their history, their rise. He saw their place in the Time War, their battles with the Daleks, and their end.

"Right," he said quietly. He swallowed and walked to the TARDIS. "I'll come out when you're done."

"Just one question," he said, hand on the TARDIS. "Who brought the Algar here?"

The procession all transformed at once, each forming the same figure, a tall human.

"Zsu," they said.

"And where's he from? I know that I said one question."

The Traxians all formed together into one sheet that cascaded along the inside of the sphere, shaping the image of mountains, forests, continents. There were islands covered in opalescent fog, steppes of endless green, and white-blue breakers at the beginning of a world covered in oceans.

The Doctor stepped away from the TARDIS. He stood in the middle of the hall and looked from canyons to valleys, from receding glaciers to firths and fjords. The sparkling of twilight gave way to wiry, luminescent webs of cityscapes, and, as the oceans waned purple and then black, a small chill ran up his side. It had been a long time since the Time Lord had seen Earth. He had watched it grow, had protected it and simultaneously seen its people burn and blight each other while the better ones held on for dear life. The few that ran away with him long ago did so for many reasons, trapped as they were on a planet that was as magical and wondrous as it was stifling and damned.

Red tugged thoughtfully on his vest. "And how did he get here? Why did he come?"

The procession formed into the Doctor in the duster. "You brought him here."

"I didn't bring him here," Red said, defensive. "I've never seen that human before."

"Then you will bring him here. Time Lord timelines are complicated."

"Did I bring him here as that, as you? As my old self?" Red stepped forward as tiny pops and bursts lit across the continents around him. "Because I couldn't have. I would remember," he said, almost entirely through his teeth. The particular generation of his life the Traxians had formed into was one of more turmoil, wonder and sadness than any the Time Lord had ever experienced.

He raced through the possibilities: Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, Donna Noble. Had one of them been with him here? The thought that there might be something left undone, or even worse, forgotten, meant revisiting a time he had spent generations forgetting. The Traxians appearing casually as his old self already disturbed Red, but if he had done something and forgotten, had adventures and companions lost to time or even one small slip where he had lost his memory and couldn't save someone and then forgot, that would mean too much. The Doctor liked who he was now, liked not owing anything to the past. He was busy searching for meaning in his own way, with his TARDIS, his spiny companion, his glowing head and gaudy vest.

"No," the procession replied. "You brought Zsu here as your current self, Time Lord. But lately your history as this incarnation presses closer and closer to the surface of your thoughts."

Small streaks flew across the shifting continents as the tranquil nocturne played out into a scene of shimmering brightness and blinding flashes.

"And what is this?" he asked, looking from inverted horizon to horizon.

"It is what we saw in Zsu's mind. We do not understand it."

Red kept scanning the scene. He pulled out his screwdriver, tossed it up and caught it. "Neither do I," the he said, returning to the TARDIS.

I I I

The Doctor had lived for almost a thousand human years. His journeys with the tall, blue TARDIS and his companions were and would be noted in the annals of countless races. Hammerbeasts and Algars were standard fare, creatures lively but misunderstood, called "beasts" because they were different, cast aside by Time Lords and Daleks and humans and anyone that couldn't understand or use them. Their presence in the cosmos seemed insignificant, while others, like the Doctor's, seemed so large. Everyone needed saving, it seemed. Everyone, everywhere, all the time, could use help. So, when the Doctor turned away from the Traxians and stepped back into his magical box that day and vanished and failed to reappear, the universe had to go back to its old way of working. Without such a looming figure as the Doctor, everyone that seemed small started to get just that much bigger.

I I I

Earth

Palamedes Temporal Research Laboratory

"They've trapped him," Zsu said, throwing a lever. "They've aged him." He pressed a sequence of red and green buttons. "They've shamed him." He traced an equation thoughtfully in the air. "And now, none of that will ever happen."

A small, white vortex opened in the center of the gray laboratory chamber. Its essence squealed and reached out like a white hell, the cavernous steel of the chamber's shell pulling inward toward it. Wires ripped from their fasteners. Buttons exploded from the consoles and flew into the vortex. Zsu walked toward the controlled maelstrom, himself untouched.

"Master of space and time," he said. "Who refuses to rescue when rescuing is due." The scientist pulled the dark shears from his pocket. He snipped around the edge of the white storm. "Who fixes time when the time is convenient." The shimmering portal began to pull apart from the room, cut finely into a slightly larger vortex of pure black. "And causes the pain he seeks to end."

Zsu put his arm into the disappearing cataclysm, jerked upward with the shears, and watched as bursts and explosions shot forth, like rainbows trying to escape the experiment only to be sucked back in.

"The universe would have been so much better without you."

Pieces of the walls and ceiling, large steel chunks, began coming loose and falling into the shattered vortex. The small, white portal seemed to suck everything in, while the larger black one expanded slowly, as if content to reach out itself and consume the room. Still, Zsu stood tall and untouched.

And then, in the wake of the small storm, he saw a face.

It was a girl's face, dark face with thick, braided hair. It was only a face, but in his mind, Zsu saw the girl standing in a white hallway wearing a little silver and black dress. She curtsied to the scientist. She curtsied to all the scientists because that's what she had seen in the little nanobook that her father had gifted her on the girl's eighth birthday.

She was Zsu's daughter.

I I I

Deep Space

Argo I Labs

Every story has a beginning, and some beginnings actually happen at the beginning. Others find their way in due course. Zsu's story did not begin when he was born or even when he died. Though, that can happen.

It began when his daughter disappeared with the Doctor, ages ago, when they had lived together at Zsu's first experiment platform, Argo I. It was the place where humanity first tested its own version of time travel, where Zsu first realized his life's dream. It was something the Doctor couldn't resist visiting. Just after he regenerated as the reddish-looking wanderer, the Time Lord found it somewhat fitting that he should travel to that particular place, to put the past behind him (it had a way of sneaking out front) and to watch humanity's first foray into the really unknown.

The Doctor dallied about on Platform 7, the practical applications section of the project. There, researchers ran calculations determining the effects of everything from stopping a war to stopping a butterfly. The Doctor, fascinated, took pleasure in pointing out every misstep, every potential disaster, every stunted war that would give birth to ten more. He laughed and joked with the crew, knowing full well that their efforts would be varied, terrible to some, but he knew that they would ultimately all be regulated and controlled. These cowboys would do no real damage. He had seen it.

Platform 11 was Zsu's stead. Experimental applications. This was the dangerous corridor, the one that required a temporal cleansing before anyone could enter. No stray timelines allowed inside. One of Zsu's experiments would seek to determine if there was an Original, a set, absolute timeline from which everything branched. He had read about the Doctor's exploits, had seen the holovids and newspapers and cave drawings. And, as fantastic a character as the Time Lord was, he was messy. There could be no telling what he had changed, what effects he had wrought on an absolute scale. Where they were living, what they were doing, could all fluctuate and change because of this one being. Zsu needed a room away from that, a place without the effects of unwanted time travel.

The technology existed, he knew, to "lock" a place in time. On Gallifrey, the Doctor's home world, it had been used to isolate a genocidal war. Zsu subsequently chartered a vessel and traveled to what he thought was the planet's location. Gallifrey wasn't there, of course, having been locked away. But there was a small rip in the event horizon of the planet's temporal prison. Someone or something had gone through. It could have been a ship or a being. Regardless, it gave Zsu a small corridor in which to work. He descended through the rip, down to the planet, and worked tirelessly for several months, looking to unearth the source of the lock. Having discovered what he thought to the the technology, the scientist flew out, returned to Earth, and earned a grant for deep space experiments based on the artifacts that he had brought back.

Zsu's daughter did not believe him.

"This can stop all time," he said, holding up a small black cylinder.

"How does it do that?" she said, incredulous. The little girl thumbed through her nanobook, the pages shifting and changing based on her questions. It went blank at her sudden inquiry.

The scientist put his cylinder into a protective case. "I don't know. Your book doesn't know. Nobody knows."

"Then how do you know it works?" She was looking at him.

Zsu bent down and touched her cheek. "Because I've seen a place where thousands of these keep a whole planet suspended in time. It doesn't move. No one can see it."

"Then how did you see it?" The book sprang to life. It drew a diagram of ocular nerves and light response.

"Someone left a door open," he said.

Argo I's first experimental functions nearly tore the station apart. Zsu pledged to send his daughter away on the first ship to Earth following the incident. The shuttle was a few weeks out at the time. So, he decided not to run any more tests until then. "I didn't realize the power," Zsu had said while holding her. "I didn't know." Three crew members had been blown out into space when the Platform 8 subcorridor power systems fluctuated and exploded. The fluctuations threatened to spread all over the station, but Zsu had a moment of insight where he linked the black time cylinder into the plasma flows, isolating them long enough to fix the problem. Her dad, who had almost killed them all, had genius enough to save them all, but there were complications.

"He doesn't know what he's doing," several engineers and fellow scientists began to say. A lot of them simply didn't feel safe after the loss of friends on the first experiment. They wanted assurances.

The Doctor appeared in the meantime, after the explosion, but before the shuttle to Earth was due to approach. It was his first time out as a new being, as the fiery figure that Leena would later call "Red." For once, he didn't have to worry about being chased away or misunderstood. Everyone on the temporal research station knew who the Time Lord was. They were all honored, without exception. And Zsu's daughter was fascinated.

The girl followed the Time Lord everywhere. She shadowed and mimed him, asked him questions about the TARDIS: "Where does it go?" "Who lives in it?" "What's it for?"

She was asking him these questions one day when Engineer Adelman Burke from Platform 7 let himself into Zsu's office and began poking around. "What is he doing in there?" they had all been asking. Zsu held the grant and therefore didn't need to explain himself to any of the crew, but his total lack of explanation, his haughtiness and increasingly mysterious demeanor had led to questions, and finally tactless espionage. Burke was holding up the small protective case containing the piece of the Gallifreyan time lock when Zsu walked in.

"My Dad says he can stop time," his daughter had told Red. "He has a thing." She put her fingers together, tracing the image of a cylinder in the air.

"Your Dad thinks he can do a lot of things." The Time Lord floated in his cloud of superiority.

"No, no, no," she said and pulled out her book. "He went to Gallifrey." A picture of blank space with stars appeared.

"He couldn't go to Gallifrey. It's time locked."

The picture on the book changed to that of an old Victorian house with the front door hanging open.

"Daddy says someone left the-"

Red picked her up and ran.

I I I

"What is this?" Engineer Burke asked, undaunted by the fact that he had been caught snooping.

Zsu reached forward. "You put that down. You put it down now, and I will forget that you came in here."

"What? It's that important?" Burke shook it.

Zsu sweated. "No, it could kill us all. Put it down."

"It could kill us all?" The engineer looked around. "What else in here could kill us all? What kind of danger have you put us in? We lost three good people-"

The scientist grabbed Burke and tried to wrest the case from his hands. The engineer let go. "Fine, fine," he said and walked out, pointing. "We're watching you."

Zsu wiped his forehead and set the case down, but slipped when he tried to support himself with a wet hand. The cylinder shot across the room and shattered in the corner. It zapped and sparked and began to grow, forming the image of a person before the scientist turned around and bolted from the room.

I I I

"We're getting out of here," the Doctor said, placing the girl on the TARDIS console. "Once you're safe back on Earth, I'll come back for your father. What's his name?"

She lipped the words, but nothing came out. The girl had gone mute. The Doctor pulled out his stethoscope.

"Are you ok? What is going on?" The girl began to flash and flicker in front of him, and the TARDIS shook. As it disappeared into the vortex on its way toward Earth, all the Doctor could read from her lips was, "I want my daddy."

Red watched the effects happening all around the little girl. He recognized them. In a faint corridor of the Time Lord's mind, he saw what was happening to the scientist's daughter.

"We're not going to Earth," he said, pulling a lever and priming the console. "We're going to Gallifrey."


End file.
